Episode Details

“It's the first kiss, it's flawless, really something, it's fearless.” Over on our paid feed on Substack, we’'re in our Fearless era (literally), diving deep into Taylor's second album track by track for our After School paid subscribers. We go through all 13 original tracks,  from the sparkly country-pop opening of "Fearless" to the quietly defiant closer "Change,” examining what each song adds to the album, what literary and emotional threads connect them, and how this era set the template Taylor would spend the next eras of her career perfecting. Along the way, we track the evolution of Taylor's fearlessness from a teenager writing on tour buses to the artist who re-recorded her masters and looked the whole industry dead in the eye.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Album context, album art, and the “Fearless” era’s place in Taylor’s discography
• Track 1: “Fearless”, previously covered in Episode 88: Weather Songs
• Track 2: “Fifteen”, previously covered in Episode 124: Time & Episode 125: Deep Dive
• Track 3: “Love Story”, previously covered in Episode 31: Shakespeare & Episode 32 Deep Dive
• Track 4: “Hey Stephen”, previously covered in Episode 1 “Songs that Made us Swifties”
• Track 5: “White Horse”, previously covered in Episode 33: Animal Studies and Episode 110: High School Musical
• Track 6: “You Belong With Me”, previously covered in Episode 98: Unreliable Narrators
• Track 7: “Breathe” ft. Colbie Caillat
• Track 8: “Tell Me Why” 
• Track 9: “You’re Not Sorry”
• Track 10: “The Way I Loved You”, previously covered in Episode 52 Psychoanalytic Theory & Episode 53 Deep Dive
• Track 11: “Forever & Always”
• Track 12: “The Best Day”, previously covered in Episode 81: Female Artists
• Track 13: “Change”, previously covered in Episode 110: High School Musical
• The purpose of the al